In the Egyptian section of the Louvre Museum there is a small model of a two-story house with an external staircase; the legend places it in the Middle Kingdom between 2033–1710 BC. The object represents a peasant dwelling, probably prosperous given its dimensions; in the same display case, other models of urban houses with two or three floors with attached balconies, watchtowers; there are two fascinating aspects of this museum artifact, the first is the technological start that signified the invention of the staircase, which, I imagine, was A long time for architecture as the wheel for transportation; the not only structural but anthropological connection that stairway technology provided between two topoi of the idea of ascesis, of vertical displacement: the ground and its mundane clear-dark and the roof, the first stage of the stellar firmament; the philosophical idea of overcoming matter, the sacrifice of the body, and the cleansing of vices, of the indeterminate, was perhaps originally linked to this device that allows vertical transport, a combination of technology and metaphysics. The Tower of Babel, the one that is intended to be reached by architectural means, seems to be an enormous helical staircase and the relationship between purity and altitude, between mortality (the universal code, the possibility of communication, the dream of the builders of Babel) and eternity (the multiplication of the code, noise and silence, God's punishment) persist in this spatial metaphor.

The second aspect, more catastrophic than fascinating, will be the awareness of finitude, that everything ends. Somewhere in a past so impossible to imagine (with its odors, sounds, colloquiality, idiomatic textures, thought schemes) as an alternative reality, that artifact served a purpose (to imitate being in the world, to entertain, to distract, explain); a purpose that now only means that in the future the emptiness that we occupy and that we call the present, “today” our “today” with a specific culture and a national identity, will be forgotten, erased. But what does this fertile crescent object have to do with this exhibition, and with these images? Probably nothing, especially for others, but when looking at Nuno Cera's photographs, in particular those that deal with unfinished objects, objects that technocracy calls infrastructure, I thought of this archetype of house. And then I felt pushed by the spectral and contradictorily diurnal dimension of the plasticity of Nuno Cera's photograph and I remembered a peculiar reference that at the beginning of his Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ernest Hemingway, makes to the fact that “... on the western summit there is the dry and icy carcass of a leopard. Nobody could explain what the leopard was looking for at that altitude.” What do we want (and what does Nuno Cera want) with the images? The same as that leopard? A horizon, something more? Test the intelligibility and communicability of the visible? Why do we continue to produce them incessantly? Do we want to understand that life is made up of the succession of death? Do we want to recover what was lost? Hold back moments that our bodies and our world (objects or subjects of the photographic annotation) don't even recognize as part of a continuum because they are immersed and indestructively linked to that flow? Baudelaire spoke about Art (from which he excluded photography despite his friend Manet making abundant use of it...) as a mnemotechny of beauty, one of his functions would be to continuously remind future people of the human capacities to face (incorporate also) through beauty, the incompleteness of the world, the aggression of natural and historical phenomena, the misshapen, the banal, the heartbreak, the hellish. Photography was born as the desire to transform light into a graph, into an image, to transfer to a surface what the eye (or its mechanical replica) sees — and also what is there and that is not tracked, memorized by the body that sees. And it was born of this age-old desire to keep an eye on things; things that for a long time only the written word, an anti-mimetic resource, seemed to ensure realism, verisimilitude.

The Egyptian house reappears in the video Espaces d'Abraxas, The Palace, the Theatre, the Arc, (2014) by Nuno Cera. A historical object (photography as an artistic operation, video as a self-referentiality constructed from the documentary hypothesis) fixes as aesthetic content a second historical object (architecture). The tragic (the discomfort of organizing the void: the incarnation of the sublime in architectural form) prevails in the unusual (because real, true, used and lived) phalanstery of Espaces d'Abraxas (1982, Noisy-le-Grand), somatization of the acropolis with its porches, columns morphed like houses, monumental structures made with the incongruity of a goldsmith. The ghost of Charles Fourier is manifested in one of the possible names of this mega-device designed by Ricardo Bofill: Palais. Espaces d'Abraxas So it's another Sarcelles, an anti-modern hybrid, hyperbole of Strada Novissima, and that, contrary to fantasy Fourierista, does not reconcile passions but seems to hide them in isolation, in atomization, in successive tides of repetition, of doing again. Kurt Schwitters said that the eternal was only what lasted the longest and in Nuno Cera's video — fragments of a visit to that space — the monotony, the absence of dissonance, of disturbances, the post-human nature of the scale seem to accentuate that duration. It is difficult to see, to hear as a totality, as a definition, the movement of a cosmos - that palace - where the indiscernible, the lives of others, the community of those who are seen and codified (who, for Nuno Cera, and for us, observers, are not interlocutors, are not realities but possibilities of reality: the adolescent leaning against the window, the adults and children who pass through the amphitheater, in the patios, the windows filled with domesticity; voyeuristic wandering even pervades the video but strays away) seem to coexist, without dialogue, without reconciliation, with the entropy of social need: good intentions and good form can go wrong, they can be the mirror of melancholy, of Neant. But even in the face of this misunderstanding — the work went wrong — the identity most heard is still that of the architect, the only one that crystallized his subjectivity (although historically located in the eighties) in a form, in a capsule that for many people became the pressing and inescapable everyday life, the atmosphere at the end of the day, the pious reality of Week-end your neighborhood, block, community.

Thus Ricardo Bofill, where the architectural past, the complicated doxography of that past (classic or modern, classic and modern, tradition of tradition, tradition of the new and tradition of the tradition of the new, heterodoxy, historicism) emerges as a mode d'emploie, and Carlo Scarpa, where architecture “reinvents the wheel” based on stabilized identities — are both claimed by Nuno Cera as photographic spaces; spaces — effects of reality — that enhance the reality of the photographable effects of the built. Photography works like a place - itself charged with reality - and “surrounded by reality on all sides”. These images of Nuno Cera continue the experience - yours, of choosing, of aesthetically deciding what you are going to do and how you are going to do it - they do not interrupt it but prolong it. There's a morbid preference in photographic intuition. It allows us to see landscapes punctuated by laconic, interrupted constructions, vertical structures, blocks, monoliths, facing their uselessness; stereotomic details, parietal surfaces approaching the Readymade — of serialization and contextual displacement: the constructions that Nuno Cera records as images are placed out of place, and appear as essays about the copy (interpretation) of the world (and its visual, pictorial and practical narratives), a copy that implies the replacement of the organic by the inert, and the sovereignty of artifice, of the false — of what it is not — in the face of that (the site-specific) that it cannot be stripped of the impurities of the place; why this thematic choice? Why these forms devoid of a beginning and an end, uprooted situated between everyday life (the sublimation of the eternal present) and failure, these forms where the inhibition and disharmony of the absolutely great prevails? The ambiguity of Nuno Cera's photographs is that we are not observing architectural photography, we are not in the realm of the photogenic betrayal of the apparent, of the sociability of the architectural work. Photography intensifies, aesthetically positions the real, but that real does not essentialize (define, stipulate) the photographic condition. Architecture appears, here, as a medium, as a finite image, surrounded by impotence and death, not the aesthetic (or functionalist) framing and control of the void but the emptiness itself. It is a space-time antagonism, in action, placed between the desire - administrative and poetic - for “social perfection” (the community in self-correction, and photography, as a meddusive force, petrifying the outside of this desire for collective improvement, as an oracle that the integrity and clarity of the youth of all things: buildings, geological bodies, what lived, was alive and still lives, of days, of names, is suspended on a sheet of paper) and the egotropism of self-perfection (the internal conflicts of creative subjectivity), by the author, are resolved in production of space (the photographic painting, the architecture) for others: the intersubjective relationship is hierarchical, the author, the masterful architect says: this is good to see, to live - but he doesn't want to be answered, he wants life, the course of things to be linked to that place (the framing in the photograph, the promenade in architecture), to prove that he deserves this place, that he deserves this representation of the absolute).

Pedro Pousada
Coimbra, January 2015